A Google penalty is easy to detect if your site has incurred a manual penalty. That’s because the Google Webmaster Console notifies you. An algorithmic penalty, on the other hand, is not only difficult to detect but also very difficult to recover from.
Manual penalties occur because unnatural links are linked to your site. You can try to get rid of such links to overcome the penalty, but that’s still no guarantee whether you will fully recover. Many smaller websites choose to simply shut down their site and move to a new domain. However, if you want to give it a shot, here’s how you can try to recover from manual Google penalties:
- See if any particular reasons have been quoted for your manual penalty and address them ASAP.
- If Google has quoted unnatural links as the reason for the manual penalty, here’s what you need to do: identify the links that are unnatural or bad by transferring them from Google Webmaster to a good SEO tool. We recommend you use one that allows manual selection of the bad links. If you allow automatic selection, it can remove the good links to your website as well. Once you have ascertained the links that are the cause of your manual penalty, then request their removal by contacting the Webmaster or choose to disavow them. Links can be manually disavowed using ‘disavow tool’ in the search console.
Your site can recover from an algorithmic penalty by:
- Improving the content.
- Making sure there are no bad links.
- Keeping the site up-to-date on the latest Google guidelines. (E.g. mobile friendliness of the site).
